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Student Multimedia Authoring: Learning in New Media Environments

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Spring 2006 Update: Looking at Learning Together
Rachel Theilheimer and Joe Ugoretz document their efforts to look at student evidence together.
http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp/dportfolio

Student Multimedia Authoring: Learning in New Media Environments. Student multimedia authorship involves dynamic combinations of media commonly kept distinct from one another: word processing, web design, movies, powerpoint, or presentations. Collaborative multimedia authorship -- involving multiple students, skills, and points of view, and frequently involving a public component -- is a practice that fosters productive mixtures of intellectual and creative processes. It integrates the diverse assets that students bring to classroom assignments in and out of the classroom. New media environments require close attention to course design, collaborative and productive forces, and assessment. This poster addresses three main issues in studnet multimedia authorships: course design, collaboration and production, and assessment.
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QuestionsFindingsModels

Course Design:
What pedagogical structures need to be present in the multimedia authoring process to help students develop multimedia skills and literacy?


 
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The answer to this question lies in the following strategies:

  • Model success: students need to see models of successful intellectual projects in multimedia production
  • Sequence assignments:  structure assignments to provide framework for students to build skills, both comprehension and application skills.
  • Scaffold assignments: structure the steps within an assignment to allow students to apply new knowledge or skills while in the production process.
  • Engage student's instrinsic motivation:  if the above strategies are used, students are more engaged with course topics while they are producing multimedia projects.


How to relate these ideas to your classroom: 

  • Model: Provide students with visible models of quality work (e.g. linking of narrative and analysis, connection of larger concepts to our lives)
  • Sequence: Structure assignments that integrate building skills while engaging with content.  Consider how classroom time is used, within a semester, for students to create successful projects.
    • Example: Tracey Weis, (U.S. History) Telling Stories about Race and Slavery
  • Scaffold: Provide intermediate steps between specific projects and larger projects are visible
    • Example: Amy Holzgang, (Sociology) Using Personal Experience to Understand Sociology


 

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QuestionsFindingsModels

Production & Collaboration:
How does the multimedia production process enhance student learning?


 
Where in the process do communicative aspects of production affect learning? 


The answer to these questions involves two essential aspects of multimedia production :

  • Make it public: Public multimedia projects heighten students' sense of purpose, craftsmanship, and ownership
  • Make it collaborative: Students bring a variety of skills, experiences, and knowledge to the creation of multimedia. The multimedia production process takes advantage of the opportunities for formal and informal possibility for collaboration that are inherent within the production process.  
  • Read more about making student work public

How to relate these ideas to your classroom:

  • Grappling with technology in the production lab promotes cooperation, mutual aid, and collaboration among students.
  • Developing multiple media and hypertextual amplification of texts engages students more deeply with theory and guides them towards making larger connections to the social/political world.
  • Foster collaboration: Help students work together on common projects, and across projects (collaboration going public on a limited scale)


 

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QuestionsFindingsModels

Assessment:
What kinds of assessment strategies & tools are needed to understand these new forms of authorship?


 
 

 To adequately understand multimedia projects, it is important to evaluate:
  • Content of a project (as opposed to its "form" or "genre")
  • Technology and media that were used (focus on form, genre, multimedia literacy issues)
  • Disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts, including visual literacy
  • Critical creativity (creativity can express both critical thinking and intellectual complexity)
  • Read more about assessing multimedia projects

How to relate these ideas to your classroom: 

Because multimedia projects are not papers, our assessment measures must take these differences into account.


Further Questions/Other areas of inquiry:

  • What differences in student learning can we observe between individually- and collaboratively-authored multimedia processes?

  • What strategies can we create that will enable students to participate in the evaluation and measurement of work produced during the collaborative process?

  • What tools can we develop to assess work that is both critical and creative?

Poster Authors
At the 2004 VKP Summer Institute, participants worked together to synthesize findings across projects in three main areas: reading, writing, and discussion. The writing group renamed itself "student multimedia authoring" (that is, student projects involving multi- or multiple media) to acknowledge the common aspect of each project. 


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This tool is based on an original model developed by the Knowledge Media Lab of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
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